When it comes to the topic of improving cardiovascular health, there is a lot of conflicting information. Everywhere you look there are celebrities promoting supplements and fad diets, and companies advertising their heavily processed foods as ‘healthy.’ With nutrition barely playing a role in medical training, it’s no surprise that opinions differ even among doctors.
All these different voices trying to grab your attention make things more complex than they need to be. In reality, increasing heart health can be simple.
The importance of heart disease prevention
In the United States alone, one person dies of chronic heart disease every 36 seconds. This is a shocking statistic, and makes it clear that we all need to work harder to improve our cardiovascular health.
But when it comes to heart disease, like many other areas of illness, the medical community is focused on treatment with little attention directed to prevention. This is a shame because people need to be aware that heart disease is preventable, and a focus on cardiovascular training can go a long way.
Heart disease doesn’t occur overnight. In fact, it can take more than a decade for poor health to cause a chronic illness, and our bodies try to warn us for a long time. While treatment can save lives, it isn’t without its drawbacks.
Heart surgery can be life altering, with a significant recovery period. It can mean periods of no driving and flying, being unable to lift more than 10lbs, tiredness, and a lifetime of medication.
The focus should be on heart disease prevention, with treatment there as a backup.
Strategies to increase heart health
People don’t get obese and develop unhealthy habits because they’re unaware of the risks, I know this from my own experience. We all know the importance of exercise, diet and stress management when it comes to our health, but the knowledge isn’t always enough to create behavioral change. The difficulty comes in finding ways to break our unhealthy habits.
Here are a number of strategies and techniques that you can use to develop and maintain habits that will improve cardiovascular health.
Creating routines
When people decide to get healthy, they often want to eliminate everything bad and become a whole new person overnight. This would be amazing if it worked but it’s impractical and invariably results in failure.
Instead, start by adding healthy habits into your daily routine. You don’t have to work on everything at once, just pick one area you know you could improve on and make it a part of your day:
- Take a 10 minute walk after breakfast, adding time or distance each week.
- Set aside time to cook your dinner using whole foods, rather than grabbing something quick.
- Take five minutes each day to meditate or relax.
- Take up a hobby or join a club that offers a regular meeting or activity, such as yoga or gym classes.
Any of these will help to increase heart health, and by making them a regular part of your day they will soon become something you do without having to think about or remember. By adding activities to your daily routine you can quickly build healthy habits or break unhealthy ones.
Remember that nobody’s perfect
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Eating three meals a day adds up to 21 a week. If you make healthy choices for 18 of those you’re going to be making improvements, so don’t chastise yourself for slipping up occasionally. The same principle applies for missing a workout. What you’re building is consistency, not perfection. Imagine your health as a house under construction, and every good decision is a brick being added. A bad decision may take one brick away, but it won’t remove the entire building unless those bad decisions outweigh the good ones.
The important thing is not to give up. Don’t use one slip up or mistake as an excuse to go back to an unhealthy diet, or to stop your daily exercise. Think of it this way: if you lost a ten dollar bill while out walking, would you follow it up by throwing more money away? Or would you get on with your day and try not to let it happen again? Most likely you’d choose the second option, and that’s the approach to take with your health.
If you ate a slice of cake or ordered pizza, enjoy it and get back on track. An occasional slip up is not a disaster, as long as you continue to keep up your health habits and work to improve cardiovascular health.
Building a support network
Humans are social creatures and in general, we find it far easier to break unhealthy habits or form healthy ones when we have others around us doing the same or offering encouragement.
Look around: support programs like Alcoholics Anonymous, diet groups like Weight Watchers, fitness groups like running clubs or gym classes, they all have one thing in common: they’re done as groups.
Being surrounded by other people that are trying to make the same improvements as you creates a feeling of community, and you’re less likely to make the wrong decision when someone else is counting on you.
I built The Stronger Hearts Society to give you this same community and accountability for improving your heart health, and you get direct access to me every single week. I’ll answer your questions, we’ll discuss actions you can take, and you’ll receive my seven principles of a stronger heart.
Join here and never wonder about how to improve your heart health again.